Thursday, 16 December 2004 Bart Frydrychowicz and Yanic Bercier of Quo Vadis Interviewed by EvilG Transcription by Nick All pictures taken by Louis-Charles Levasseur and used by permission of troisrivieresmetal.com. Quo Vadis is the best prog/death metal band I've heard since Into Eternity. Both are Canadian bands, but Quo Vadis comes from the burgeoning Quebec metal scene where a long list of extreme metal bands has emerged. For many it all began with VoiVod in the 80's to newer bands like Cryptopsy, Kataklysm, Gorguts, Martyr, Oblivion, etc... After I heard the new Quo Vadis album DEFIANT IMAGINATION, I was instantly hooked. The album is miles ahead of everything they've done prior to this release. If you are into progressive death metal and bands like Death, you should already know who these guys are. I was given the opportunity to interview guitarist Bart Frydrychowicz and drumgod Yanic Bercier of Quo Vadis. The lengthy (50+min) interview covered things like the new album and why it took a long time coming, the guest appearance of bass legend Steve DiGiorgio on the album, and the band's determination to get on the road and to make this album the one that really puts them on the international metal map. I´ve got a bunch of questions lined up. A lot of them are about your new album, DEFIANT IMAGINATION. I heard your first demo a few years ago and I must admit you’ve come a long way since you first started. Yanic: You mean the demo from ‘95? Holy crap! I remember listening to it and now that I´ve got your new album it´s like night and day the difference between how far the band has come. Obviously you must be quite happy with your new album. Yanic: Oh yeah, very much so. On the back of my cd it just says “Quo Vadis Metal 2004”. Is this your own label or are you signed with some kinda deal with Fusion 3/Skyscraper or something like that? Yanic: We have distribution right now with Fusion 3 in Canada and the album is released with Skyscraper. Has there been any interest from any of the other big metal labels that lots of releases come out on these days, the Nuclear Blast’s, the Century Media’s and all those labels? Yanic: I think that what the band is looking into right now is having control over the release. That means the distribution, any of the decision making and I think that having the band control everything that´s going on is probably what´s best for the band right now. I think that working with Skyscraper, working jointly with them, we can get everything that we want because we´re very much part of the decision making. So I think it was the best decision for the band to kinda release it with Skyscraper in on it at the same time. Bart: You have to remember that the industry right now is undergoing tremendous amounts of change due to the new technology that is coming out, etcetera. And big labels – I´m not gonna name any names – what they tend to do is sign new bands for 30 years or 50 years, ten albums. And it´s not necessarily the best choice for a band right now, even if they do have a contract, to go ahead. I´ve heard of contracts where you´re a band and you sign and one of the clauses is that anything that is done outside of the band with any of the musicians is owned by the label as well. So that means any side project or anything like that. Say Yanic goes out and starts another band. If Quo Vadis signs with the wrong label, they own it. Yanic can say nothing, he cannot to anything, you know what I mean? It´s really crazy the way they´ve become, because the labels right now are aware of this paragraph shit that is going on. They´re trying to protect themselves for the future because nobody can tell what´s gonna happen in two years. From our perspective, being in charge of all your material is extremely, extremely important right now and for the next couple of years. Once things stabilize, then you can start giving things away to labels. The thing is, Quo Vadis is run right now like a label. We partner with Skyscraper and it´s working out amazingly well, we´re very happy. I´m sure that Steph from Skyscraper is happy as well, because he gives a lot of attention to the band. I don´t think I would have done it any other way. If we had all the same options and the same opportunities from the last two years, I wouldn´t have done any decisions differently. I know the recording and the entire process of getting the cd mastered, recorded, released, everything took a fair amount of time. Was a lot of this beyond your control or were you basically taking your time to ensure things were done exactly how you wanted it done? Yanic: I think part of it was in our control and was not in our control. I think we are a band that´s very demanding and we have specific requirements for how we want the band to sound. Once you start working with the sound engineer and things are moving forward, but not at the pace that you would like or in the direction that you want, it´s time to make a decision on a new direction to the project. I think we had to do that in the case of this project. Basically we went down to Audio Hammer, working with Jason Suca, and that was something new that we hadn´t done in the past. We went down there, we mixed for a week, at which point we thought it would be a good idea to let Jim Morris have a look at it. Jim Morris from Morrisound has a tremendous amount of experience in the field. Jason Suca actually contacted Jim and got Jim to come to Jason´s studio at Audio Hammer to work with Jason on some of the tracks. So Jim came for one day and Bart and I were very happy with the way songs were turning out with Jim. At which point we decided to take the tracks to Morrisound, in Jim´s environment, for him to optimize the performance. He knows the room, he knows the equipment he has there and he has a lot more equipment than at Audio Hammer so there were a lot more possibilities that were available to us at Morrisound. So myself, Bart and Jason went to Jim Morris´s studio and got them mixed there for about three days. Then we got an amazing mix. We´re very, very happy with it, I think it sounds great. And like Bart puts a lot of emphasis on, this is the first time that we hear absolutely everything. That´s a very good feeling to have in this position. How long did you take writing the album before you started the recording process? Bart: I guess the writing process took something like six months to establish the structures of the songs, like the main riffs and all that. And then we had some line- up changes just before going into the studio and we recorded those parts in 2002. After that we continued working on the rest, the other guitar lines, the harmonies, things like that, vocals, bass. Going back to your other question, it was a bit of both because we took our time but we had to wait for about a year for different studio availabilities and stuff like that. We were ready to go, but we couldn´t, the schedules didn´t match. Were you ever frustrated with how long it was taking? Bart: There were times. When you´re working on a project for a long time, and this has taken two years, when you´ve already made up your mind on how it´s going to be and you can hear in your head what it´s going to sound like and there are no more questions to be answered about writing or creating, then you just want it to finish like today. Get it out! We went through like three mixes, four mixes, it just took forever with that. But right now, we´re very happy with the outcome, so it was all worth it. Can you tell me a bit about the cover artwork and how it was developed? Did you have any input into the look and feel of it? Bart: Basically we were working with a couple of artists. Once we had the mix done and were doing the mastering we had time to start thinking about layout and artwork and stuff, so we were looking at different artists that would be possible. We started with a couple of them, we gave them our ideas and the stuff that was coming back was… You know the feeling you get when you read a book, then you see the movie and the movie was not what you imagined? That happens all the time. Bart: Exactly. When you express something, when you explain to someone else, they might get the main idea but pieces of it are different, the feel is different, the perspective is different. So we were like “oh, that´s good”, “oh that´s good enough” and the whole time I was like ”Man, that´s not IT!” I was surfing the web the whole time, trying to figure out some undiscovered artists and that´s exactly what happened.